day 20, calling it quits TEMPORARILY

12am: no sleep
4am: sleep!…. for like 12 hours

So I’m gonna call it quits and take a vacation from uberman for a few days, then start fresh again. I’ve gotten into a stupid cycle where my body expects me to oversleep.

day 19

12am: no sleep
4am: no sleep
8am: sleep
10am: sleep
12pm: sleep
4pm: no sleep
6pm: no sleep
8pm: a little sleep

day 18

12am: no sleep

oh my god… this is getting so annoying… overslept again, I somehow ended up in my bed before nap time… i don’t even remember how i got there… I overslept probably about 8 hours this time.

Now, instead of laying down for naps every 4 hours, I’m just going to stay up until I feel really tired and then start taking naps.

4pm: sleep
8pm: no sleep

day 17

12am: no sleep
2am: sleep
4am: no sleep
6am: sleep
8am: sleep
are you serious??… I just had a NEW type of oversleep. One for which I don’t remember falling asleep OR waking up. I was sitting at my computer and all of a sudden I realize like a ~1.5 hrs had gone by. It’s such a weird feeling, feels like I was abducted by aliens or something. So sitting at my computer is no longer safe from falling asleep… sigh I guess I’m going to have to take a lot of walks
4pm: sleep
8pm: sleep

day 16

12am: sleep
4am: sleep

*sigh*… i overslept about 3 hours.. from 7-10am… i remember what happened. i was super tired and made up some excuse to myself to sit on my bed for a few minutes and that was that. I should have thrown in an extra nap at 6am.

12pm: no sleep
4pm: sleep
8pm: no sleep

day 15

12am: no sleep
2am: no sleep
4am: no sleep
6am: sleep
8am: sleep
10am: sleep
12pm: sleep
4pm: sleep
8pm: sleep

day 14

12am: no sleep
4am: sleep

Blah, I started doing stupid shit like laying in bed to watch TV knowing it was likely I would pass out. And I did, and slept from about 6am – 10am, another four hours… I can feel my motivation slipping. But I’m gonna keep going. I have to give the extra naps a legitimate shot.

12pm: no sleep
4pm: no sleep
8pm: no sleep

day 13

12am: I was kinda thinking/excited about something so I couldn’t fall asleep
4am: no sleep
8am: sleep
12pm: sleep
I had to really try hard not knock out between my 8-12 naps and 12-4. Taking a walk helped a lot.
4pm: sleep

I overslept till 8pm!! This one is really weird because my secondary alarm didn’t go off at all. I’m pretty sure I would remember if it did because it’s painfully loud. This means I must have woken up from the nap and been using the computer for at least 20-30 minutes after the nap. And then gone back to bed at some point after that. The weird thing is I have no memory of this. It’s kinda scary to think you can be awake for 20 minutes and have no memory of it at all.

At this point the only thing I can think of to do is add extra naps.

12 days on 48 hours of sleep…

Jatin said:
April 26, 2008 at 1:42 pm e

approx (on higher side) you have slept around 48 hours in 12 days i.e avg. 4 hours per day (including all over sleeps). How do you feel your current efficiency level is as compared to pre adaptation phase.

I don’t want anyone to take any conclusions on polyphasic away from this post since I am definitely not adjusted to a polyphasic sleep schedule yet.

I can say my efficiency is as good as before polyphasic. I want to say it’s a little better but this is extremely hard to judge because of: personal bias towards wanting it to be true, reading other people say this is true before I even started, or the inability to differentiate between the effects of the actual sleep schedule and the effects of a big lifestyle change (which this is) that temporarily produces lots of mental activity/changes.

I’m a programmer so it’s pretty easy to judge when I’m sucking mentally. Other than the small amount of time when I’m actually feeling groggy I am functioning great.

There is another big psychological benefit for me. The feeling of having more time is self fulfilling. I often don’t do something because I feel that I don’t have enough time for it or that given my limited time I should find something better to do. This is usually a horrible thought pattern and in the end only hurts you. Now that I can tell myself I have 22 hours a day it’s much easier to stop thinking that way. Things that I “didn’t have time for” before I can now just rationalize that I’m doing them in the time I would have spent sleeping. It’s pretty cool.

Completely unrelated to polyphasic sleep, I am doing 30-40 pushups when I get up from every nap (to help wake me up). That works out to be ~200 pushups a day, some pretty good exercise. In my regular sleeping schedule I do go to the gym quite often, so that much exercise isn’t really hard for me. But it’s definitely not something I’ve done on a regular basis at least since I was in high school.

The one thing standing in my way now is the strong tiredness that creeps up on me about every 4 days before I have an oversleep incident. I am determined to beat it this time, either by powering through it, or by adding an extra nap.

day 3.4 or day 12

I’m changing the day numbering to just count from the beginning since I’m not going to “restart” when I have oversleeps anymore.

12am: sleep

4am: sleep

At some point around 5-6am I fell asleep and woke up at 10:30am. So I had about 4-5 hours of oversleep. At this point I’m going to start adding extra naps in between the regular naps when I get really tired. This is what Steve Pavlina did and I think adding an extra nap has way less potential for screwing up the adjustment than a 4+ hour oversleep.

12pm: sleep

4pm: friend came over in middle of nap so i missed it

8pm: sleep